The molecular basis of conductive and vascular tissue development in plants

ongoing

Plants contribute up to 80% of all biomass on earth. Despite their staggering diversity; dominant land plants share a highly important characteristic: the presence of a vascular system providing physical support and long distance transport. This is however not a simple binary trait, as some non-vascular mosses contain cells with conductive capacity resembling that of vascular plants. Available evidence indeed suggests that conductive tissues of non-vascular plants are functionally homologous to vascular tissues in vascular plants and can even be compared at a molecular level. However, the molecular players involved in conductive tissue development remain almost completely unknown. Moreover, although key molecular regulators of vascular tissue development have been identified in the model plant Arabidopsis, very few are shown to be functionally conserved across vascular plants. Despite their importance for growth and development, we thus have a limited understanding of the evolutionary conserved regulators of plant plumbing systems. In PIPELINES, I will consolidate my expertise in single-cell applications and build a dedicated team to identify conserved molecular players specific to vascular and conductive tissues by combining multi-species comparative single-cell and spatial transcriptomics with gene regulatory network inference; and characterize these factors using loss-of-function approaches. By comparing this data, I will determine the ancestral set of regulators sufficient to trigger specification and differentiation events in plants; and validate these through introduction of single-cell sample multiplexing in a heterologous system. By unravelling the molecular basis of vascular and conductive tissue development and identifying conserved core developmental regulators, the output of PIPELINES will act as a starting point for targeted engineering of vascular tissues; which holds great potential for improving plant biomass and productivity in crop species.